The goal of the
Dictionary is to collect, preserve and make freely available the
previously-unrecorded biographies of African Christian leaders like Bhengu—and
the many thousands of others who were vital to the growth of the church on that
continent.

“There are lots of
stories of western missionaries, but not of the Africans they worked with, who
did much of the work and who carried on after the missionaries went home,” says
Bonk, 72, who left the province in 1997 to direct the Overseas Ministries Study
Center in New Haven, Connecticut.

When he retired in 2013,
he came back to Manitoba, bringing the responsibility of continuing to support
and supervise the Dictionary with him.

“The stories of these
key people were not being told, they had no voice,” he says, adding “they have
amazing stories. I’m quite passionate about them.”

Bonk, a member of the
Fort Garry Mennonite Fellowship, first got the idea for the Dictionary while
serving as an aid worker in Ethiopia in the early 1970s.

“I noticed that what I
had learned about Christianity in Africa didn’t match what I was seeing on the
ground,” he says.

But when he searched
books about the church in Africa, he couldn’t find much of anything about
African Christians—but lots about western Christians who served in Africa.

He doesn’t blame the
missionaries for failing to record the stories of their African colleagues; the
times were different, they didn’t have the skills, and they were too busy
writing about their ministries in order to raise funds from back home, he says.

But that didn’t mean he
couldn’t try to rectify the situation.

Fortunately, the World Wide Web was
being born around the same time he started creating the Dictionary, making is
much easier to publish and share the stories.

Today the Dictionary,
which is housed by the Boston University School of Theology, has grown to 3,000
entries, with about 150 new biographies added each year. Bonk estimates there
is a backlog of over 500 stories waiting to be published.

In addition to Bonk, the
Dictionary is supported by an advisory council of 12 people from countries in
Africa. All the work is done by volunteers; it costs about $50,000 a year to
keep it going, including an annual gathering of the council in Africa. The
funding comes from foundations and individual donors.

“It’s not perfect,” Bonk
acknowledges, noting that the “quality of work overall is varied.” But he also
doesn’t want to get bogged down in “scholarly debates” about the style or
methods of research.

“I just want to get the
stories down,” he says, noting that “some memory is better than no memory.”

“This is the first
generation work. The second generation can worry about the veracity. This is
the best we can do right now.”

So far, the process “has
worked pretty well,” he says, noting that he wants to publish more stories of
female leaders, along with stories of musicians—“music is so integral to
Christianity in Africa,” he says.

One thing Bonk wants to
emphasize is that the Dictionary isn’t just for African Christians. Canadian
Christians, he says, should also visit the site to read about the “raw power of
the Gospel to transform hopelessness into hope in people’s lives.”

The stories, he goes on
to say, will also remind Canadian Christians “we are part of something much
bigger than ourselves, and that we have things to learn from Christians in other
countries.”